The Exciting World of 3D Environment & Lighting- Game Dev Series 55

Quick introduction of Unity 3D environment and lighting.

So far we keep spinning around in 2D world with less 3D environment and setting. From this article, we will start stepping in the world of 3D in Unity and creating fabulous game with great lighting and tuning.

There are 2 main parts that we will quick introduce in this article.

• Lighting: the environment presenting
• Material: deeper examine to object material

Lighting

Here is a quick view of the game scene full with lighting setting.

As it shows, the whole space is surrounded by the lighting design. There are some visible light in it: the city light from the window, the lamp, and the showcase.

However, all of these just simply use one light source in scene. Sounds impossible? There is a main function in Unity called Light Probe Group, which we will introduce in the upcoming articles. With this function, light reflection between objects will be calculated on non static objects and has a complete simulation.

Light Probe everywhere!

Material

We only touched the little part of material in the previous 2D game by adjusting the albedo color. With 3D world, we will examine the detail of material with lighting.

Play with material, we can easily create metal-like reflection, surface smoothness, and the shadow casting on objects. The more detail we working on it, the quality would getting better.

The tiny difference with occlusion value changing

What I am looking forward in the upcoming process, is manipulating every adjustable function to know more about the power of Unity engine. A realistic world with full material rendered environment is coming.

In the next article, we will create the background of our game- the skybox.